Wednesday, May 31, 2017

There was a big ruckus four years ago when the Associated Press announced that telephone records for 20 of its reporters had been subpoenaed by the Justice Department.

The government was apparently looking for CIA leaks about an operation in Yemen.

Well, a Washington source of mine tells me it’s happening again. The Justice Department has gotten a warrant from the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — also known as the FISA court — to conduct electronic surveillance on a group of journalists who’ve been the recipient of leaked information, the source said.Read more....

WNU Editor: I felt uncomfortable when President Obama was doing it ....

* Defeated Democrat is back on the speaking circuit, telling a Silicon Valley get-together about her election loss
* Clinton says her defeat isn't her fault as she claims Russians and 'forces in this country' were out to defeat her
* She claims 1,000 Russian agents were filling Facebook with 'lies' and the 'majority' of news on it was 'fake'
* Clinton said she was certain someone had 'colluded' so the Russians knew what fake news worked and added: 'I'm leaning towards Trump.'
* Also blamed her own party for having poor-quality voter data, claimed she was the victim of misogyny, and that she was kept off the air by TV networks

Hillary Clinton launched an all-out assault on Donald Trump Wednesday, claiming he must have 'guided' Russian efforts to keep her out of the White House.

Openly saying that she believed he had 'colluded' with Russia, she made an astonishing series of claims about the presidential election, including claiming that the 'vast majority' of news about her on Facebook was 'fake'.

She even cited 'Pizzagate', claiming that claims she was involved in a child sex-trafficking network in a Washington D.C. restaurant had helped swing 'low information voters'.

WNU Editor: She has supporters on her claim that she lost the information war .... Hillary Clinton Was the First Casualty in the New Information Wars(Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic). What's my take .... she rips into everyone in this one hour sit-down .... but while she does not name President Obama ....Clinton rips DNC: I inherited nothing(The Hill) you can tell that she is not happy with him either. As to her claim taht 1,000 Russian agents colluded with the Trump team .... sighhh .... and they say President Trump is into hyperbole sometimes.

When politics is the name of the game, one man’s treason is another man’s service to the nation.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just over half (53%) of all Likely U.S. Voters still consider the leaking of classified information to the media to be an act of treason. Thirty percent (30%) disagree, while 18% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

President Trump reportedly asked world leaders to contact him directly on his cellphone, raising questions about security, the Associated Press reported Tuesday.

The request, which poses a risk of having the conversations of the U.S. president intercepted, breaks with diplomatic protocol.

Trump urged Canadian and Mexican leaders to call his cellphone, former and current U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the practice told the the news wire, adding that only Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has utilized the direct communication line.

WNU Editor: I read a while back that a lot of world leaders do share their cell phone numbers. But this is the first time that I am learning of a U.S President doing this .... and I am not comfortable with it.

More News On President Trump Sharing His Cell Phone Number With Other World Leaders

A former Afghan member of ISIS and a Taliban commander say claims of credit for such an atrocity are almost irrelevant, as long as the U.S.-backed regime is discredited.

The Ramadan morning began with an enormous explosion in Kabul, right at rush hour near the Afghan capital’s embassy row. The boulevard in Wazir Akbar Khan district is one of the busiest in the city, filled with pedestrian traffic as well as cars coming and going to the offices of diplomats, the American military, and Afghan government officials. More than 80 people were killed and hundreds injured, many of them severely, and, as it happened, virtually all of them were Afghan citizens, from street vendors to soldiers, traffic cops, bank clerks, and workers in the telephone company.

KABUL, Afghanistan — In one of the deadliest single strikes of the long Afghan war, a truck bomb on Wednesday devastated a central area of Kabul near the presidential palace and foreign embassies, serving as a horrible reminder that the capital city itself has become a hazardous battlefield.

In one moment, more than 80 lives ended, hundreds of people were wounded and many more were traumatized, in the heart of a city defined by constant checkpoints and the densest concentration of Afghan and international forces.Read more ....

The planned 155mm artillery round will use a combination of guidance systems, but is entirely "GPS-Free."

The U.S. Navy is leading developing a new 155mm artillery round capable of destroying moving targets on land or at sea that could end up in use across three services, including the U.S. Army and Marine Corps. More importantly, the precision munitions will not use GPS, making them useful even in GPS denied environments.

The Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division (NSWC Dahlgren), and the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) have been coordinating on the project, blandly titled the Moving Target Artillery Round. The MTAR acronym has apparently lent itself to a more colorful program logo featuring a minotaur throwing the notional projectile. The Navy and its partners are still ironing out the full requirements, having just put out an official contracting notice looking for information from prospective industry partners in May 2017. The plan is to have the project formally up and running sometime in 2019.

Venezuelan security forces used water cannons and teargas to disperse tens of thousands of opposition protesters heading toward the foreign ministry on Wednesday as the Organization of American States held another meeting on the crisis.

Two months of protests against President Nicolas Maduro's socialist government have convulsed the South American OPEC nation, with at least 59 people killed in the unrest.

* Forces backed by U.S., Iran in race to take Islamic State land
* ‘This is the most complicated battlespace anyone’s ever known’

Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate in eastern Syria is surrounded by some of the world’s strongest military powers. Their forces are advancing on several fronts. The battlefield odds aren’t even close.

That’s why the commanders of those armies -- in Washington, Moscow and Tehran, as well as Damascus and Ankara -- are looking beyond the coming showdown with the jihadists. When they’re killed or driven out, who’ll take over? It’s an especially sharp dilemma for President Donald Trump. Because for the second time this century, the U.S. risks defeating one Middle Eastern enemy only to see another one, Iran, emerge as the big winner.

WNU Editor: My read is different .... President Trump is more focused on destroying the Islamic State using the Kurds as its proxies .... not going to war against Iranian backed forces. The question should be .... does Iran want to fight the U.S., and will they do it in Syria. The Iranians could do so in Iraq right now .... they have more than enough forces to give U.S. forces in Iraq a lot of grief (and vice versa). But I think there is a general agreement among all parties that the priority is to get rid of the Islamic State first .... and deal with the outcome later. As to what will that outcome be and how it will play out .... from my perspective that is still up in the air.

WASHINGTON—Circling every level multiple times with no luck whatsoever, Washington Post reporter Philip Rucker was frustrated Tuesday that every space in the parking garage was taken up by an anonymous source.

“I’ve gone around and around, but I can’t find a single spot that isn’t already filled by an unidentified White House leaker,” said an exasperated Rucker, who recalled how easy it was to nab a prime parking place to clandestinely receive privileged information only a few short years ago.

“It’s such a nightmare driving all the way to the very top of the whole fucking structure to hold a secret meeting with an informant and then have to squeeze into a spot reserved for compact cars that another journalist who’s meeting with a whistle-blower is halfway parked in anyway.

Seriously, I have to start scheduling these rendezvous earlier, because as soon as dusk settles in, you can forget it.”

At press time, Rucker was idling his car near the space occupied by a New York Times reporter who had just received a thumb drive and appeared to be wrapping things up.

The current course of denigrating those deemed insufficiently Ukrainian will only lead to a fracturing of the country.

Last month Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko dramatically expanded his country’s sanctions against Russia by imposing multiyear sanctions on a number of IT companies. Once they are fully implemented these sanctions will impact some twenty-five million Ukrainians, or nearly every Ukrainian internet user.

These were but the latest in a litany of sanctions that began in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea. First, restrictions were imposed on Russian television news programs, then artists, films and, most recently, books published in Russia. Most recently, Ukraine passed a law requiring 75 percent of television content to be in the Ukrainian language—leading one Western journalist to accuse Poroshenko of appearing to “equate being Ukrainian with speaking Ukrainian.”

Critics say the government is trying to create a virtual wall around Ukraine, in a futile attempt to keep out all Russian influence. They worry that once this is accomplished, Kiev will seeks to impose a nationalist agenda on the country by attacking as disloyal the cultural affinity that most eastern Ukrainians feel for Russia.

WNU Editor: Currently .... President Poroshenko is polling in the teens. These new measures are going to guarantee his poll numbers going into the single digits. The next Ukraine Presidential election is slated in March, 2019 .... and everyone I know in Ukraine are just waiting for that day. In the meantime .... the anger that is building up in the territories in the east and in the south east .... and in major cities like Kharkiv where my aunt and her family lives .... I am genuinely worry that Ukraine may soon be entering into a wider conflict beyond Luhansk and Donetsk.

Most of NATO’s frontline members in eastern and southern Europe are doing their part. Germany is not.

German chancellor Angela Merkel has reaffirmed her position as the unlikely superhero of Europe’s liberal elites. Twelve years in power and facing a difficult election in September, she struck out at the least popular man in Europe: Donald Trump.

Fresh from last week’s G-7 summit, Merkel took a dig at Trump that won her liberal friends around the world. At a Sunday election rally in Munich, she declared that “the times when we could fully rely on others are to some extent over -- I experienced that in the last few days.” The last few days, that is, meeting with Trump.

That’s not rousing rhetoric, to be sure, but the world took her point. Alarmist headlines about the disintegration of the postwar order appeared throughout the world. Even in the United States there was talk of the United States losing its “closest and oldest allies.”

* Russia has launched five successful flights of the hypersonic jet, say reports
* The weapon cannot be stopped by the Navy's current defences, experts say
* Zircon could render Navy's new £6.2billion ($7.9billion) aircraft carriers useless
* Missile is being tested and could be fitted to Russian cruisers by 2018

Russia has launched five successful flights of a hypersonic jet that is capable of destroying an aircraft carrier with a single impact, according to a new report.

The Zircon cruise missile travels between 3,800mph and 4,600mph - five to six times the speed of sound - and puts Russia 'half a decade' ahead of the US', the report says.

This makes it faster than any anti-missile system, including those that are expected to appear in the next two decades.

WNU Editor: Oh oh .... people are now getting concern. But testing is different from manufacturing and deployment .... and Russia is probably still far-away from having this system being successfully deployed. But .... the alarm bells are now ringing.

The Philippine military is urging Islamist militants occupying a southern city to turn themselves in as the brutal conflict that has left over 100 people dead enters its eighth day.

The Government says it is close to retaking Marawi City from the Islamic State-linked Maute group, which seized parts of the city after a failed attempt by security forces to capture Isnilon Hapilon, the militants' so-called leader of South-East Asia.

"We call on the remaining terrorists to surrender while there is an opportunity," Brigadier-General Restituto Padilla said.

KABUL, Afghanistan — A truck bombing near the Afghan presidential palace early Wednesday killed at least 80 people and wounded hundreds, officials said. The death toll seemed certain to rise, and the attack appeared to be one of the bloodiest of the long Afghan war.

The huge blast during the morning rush hour caused panic in much of central Kabul, shattering windows as far as a mile away. Nearly two hours after the explosion near Zanbaq Square, a crowded area in the capital that leads to the presidential palace as well as major foreign embassies, plumes of smoke were still rising from the scene.

When U.S. President Donald Trump told Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte that the U.S. had two submarines in the waters near Korea, it began a controversy over whether sharing the subs’ location was a leak of classified information and a security risk. A submarine’s ability to remain hidden is its greatest asset, and Asian countries are increasingly willing to pay for that capability. Avascent Analytics estimates that Asian countries will spend nearly $40 billion on submarines over the next 10 years.

The missiles destroyed heavy equipment and killed fighters that Islamic State had transferred from its stronghold, Raqqa, to Palmyra, the Russian Defense Ministry has said.

The Russian warships, a frigate named Admiral Essen and submarine named Krasnodar, fired Kalibr cruise missiles on combat vehicles and militants outside the Syrian city of Palmyra, the Defense Ministry said.

The four cruise missiles were fired from the eastern Mediterranean, it noted in a statement. The submarine fired its missiles while submerged.

* WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
* Massive suicide truck bomb blast has rocked the diplomatic quarter of Kabul that houses foreign embassies
* At least 80 are dead and 350 more were injured in explosion, according to Afghan health ministry officials
* The explosion happened in rush hour close to the British, German, French and US embassies in Afghan capital
* BBC Afghan driver Mohammed Nazir has been killed and four BBC journalists were injured in the atrocity
* No group has claimed responsibility but Taliban and ISIS have staged large-scale attacks in Kabul in the past

At least 80 people -including a BBC driver - are dead and 350 more are injured after a massive bomb concealed in a water tanker ripped through Kabul's diplomatic quarter this morning.

Bodies littered the street and a towering plume of smoke could be seen over the Afghan capital after the truck attack blew out the windows in a number of foreign missions and residences nearby.

Officials said most of the casualties this morning were civilians and 'many women and children' were among the victims.

President Trump has some unwavering support from a very unique demographic: Republican military veterans. An extensive new Pew Research Center reveals that 98 percent of these GOP vets approve of the job Mr. Trump is doing. He has some fans across the greater population of vets as well. The poll also found that 54 percent of them also approve of the president.

Another 47 percent of independent vets and 10 percent of Democratic vets approve of the president.

“U.S. veterans, who broadly supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, have remained positive about the job he is doing as president,” wrote Shiva Maniam, and analyst for the pollster.

“In April, 54 percent of those who have served in the military approved of his job performance. Trump’s job approval among the overall public was just 39%, according to the same survey, which was conducted using Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel,” Mr. Maniam said.

Read more....WNU Editor: Only 54%? This is a low number for a U.S. Republican President.

THE Conservatives will lose their outright majority clinched by David Cameron in 2015 in the upcoming June 8 election, a YouGov projection has claimed.

The calamitous news for Theresa May comes from the first seat by seat projection for the campaign, and suggests the Conservatives will fall 16 seats short of an overall majority.

The YouGov prediction would leave Theresa May with 310 MPs – 20 fewer than at the time of dissolution of the last Parliament – while Labour are set to surge from 229 to 257 MPs on June 8 election, a gain of 28 seats in the Commons.

The shocking scenario could leave Theresa May’s hand weakened ahead of Brexit negotiations – or see her ousted by an opposing coalition government.

America’s ground forces are not accustomed to looking at the sky. That’s because the last time the United States sustained a reported casualty from an enemy aircraft was April 15, 1953 — 64 years ago.

For decades, American air dominance has gone almost uncontested, and ground forces have all but forgotten they can be touched from above. But thanks to the proliferation of small, low-cost drones and desktop manufacturing, that paradigm is now changing — and quickly. As T.X. Hammes argued last year, small aerial drones have brought about the “democratization of airpower.” Today, both state and non-state actors are capable of coordinating precision air attacks at remarkably low costs. And the U.S. military is alarmingly unprepared.

It’s not that the government isn’t spending money on the problem. The Department of Defense’s FY2017 budget request called for $226.7 million on counter-drone solutions. The problem is that we have failed to adequately inform our troops about the threat. As a result, the United States has a force that, at the fighting level, remains shockingly and dangerously unaware the threat even exists.

Remember that epic screw-up at the Academy Awards in February? Nuclear commanders might easily make the same mistakes. Uh-oh.

Talk with experts on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, and it soon becomes clear that the biggest threat Americans face isn’t an intentional act of evil, but a confluence of stupidity and error. After all, the most frightening close calls during the Cold War started with trivial mistakes -- a dropped socket from a socket wrench, for example, or a training tape put in the wrong computer.

With nine missile tests just this year, North Korea is quickly advancing the range of its nuclear weapons. The distance record goes to a missile called Hwasong-12, which was launched on May 14. It traveled about 500 miles, but on a steep trajectory that demonstrated the power to have gone more than 2,400 miles.

If Kyiv draws new battle lines in the country’s language war, Moscow is ready to restart its side of this conflict.

"I have no desire to become a soldier in this war of words,” Ukraine’s best-known novelist Andrei Kurkov wrote in 2012. He was reacting to the furor over a law instituted by former president Viktor Yanukovych that elevated Russian to the status of a regional language in Ukraine.

Kurkov writes mainly in Russian but was a supporter of the Maidan protests of 2013 that overthrow Yanukovych and turned Ukraine towards Europe. His was a plea to keep language politics out of the conflict between Moscow and Kyiv.

Unfortunately that plea is unheard and Ukraine’s language wars are restarting. A bill requiring 75 percent of national television broadcasts to be in Ukrainian has just been passed by the Rada. It follows a very unpopular move by President Poroshenko to ban Russian-language social media websites, such as Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki.

WNU Editor: In the eastern part of Ukraine .... Russian is the dominant language .... and it has been the case for centuries. But the Ukraine government has now gone all out to restrict and ban Russian, starting with President Poroshenko banning Russian-language social media websites, such as Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki. But this pales when compared to Kiev's restrictions on the use of the Russian language in the school systems. This alone has created an enormous amount of ill-will and resentment .... adding only more fuel to the separatist cause. If all of these additional anti-Russian measures are passed into law by the Ukraine government .... which I predict they will .... Russia will not have to restart its side of this conflict .... the Ukrainian-Russians will be doing it themselves.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called allegations of interference in the U.S. presidential election a “fiction” created by Democrats as an excuse for their defeat at the ballot box.

“They simply lost, and they must acknowledge it,” Mr. Putin said in an interview published Tuesday in the French newspaper Le Figaro.

“They want to explain to themselves and prove to others that they had nothing to do with it, their policy was right, they have done everything well, but someone from the outside cheated them. It’s not so,” he said. “People who lost the vote hate to acknowledge that they indeed lost because the person who won was closer to the people and had a better understanding of what people wanted.”

FILE PHOTO: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watches the test of a new-type anti-aircraft guided weapon system organised by the Academy of National Defence Science in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) May 28, 2017. KCNA/via REUTERS

WASHINGTON — Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on Sunday said that his "dashboard warning light was clearly on" when asked about whether he knew about communications between Russians and White House senior adviser and President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

"I have to say that, without specifically affirming or confirming these conversations — since, even though they're in the public realm, they're still classified — just from a theoretical standpoint, I will tell you that my dashboard warning light was clearly on and I think that was the case with all of us in the intelligence community, very concerned about the nature of these approaches to the Russians," Clapper said during an exclusive interview on NBC's "Meet The Press."

WNU Editor: His remarks that the Russians are "genetically" driven is at the 3:35 mark in the above video. The key paragraph ....

.... "If you put that in context with everything else we knew the Russians were doing to interfere with the election, and just the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, almost genetically, [are] driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So we were concerned."

I do not know how to respond to this .... and this is a former Director of National Intelligence?!?!?!

In this same interview former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says that his "dashboard warning light was on" .... after listening to him for the past few months, as well as former CIA Director Brennan, former National Security adviser Susan Rice, and former FBI Director Comey .... my "dashboard warning light" is telling me that these individuals were either directly or indirectly spying on the Trump team during the election .... and even after the election. And speaking of Jared Kushner .... it looks like the media's big Jared Jushner story that he had spear-headed a back channel to Russia may have a problem .... What Is the Washington Post Hiding About Its Jared Kushner Story? (Daily Caller). As to what is my take on this Jared Kushner story .... President Obama tried numerous times to open up back-channels with Russia (and vice versa) .... Inside Obama’s Secret Outreach to Russia (Josh Rogin, Bloomberg) .... so why all the sudden the focus on Kushner doing the same thing but never on President Obama. Media bias you say?

About Me

I have been involved in numerous computer science projects since the 1980s, as well as developing numerous web projects since 1996.
These blogs are a summation of all the information that I read and catalog pertaining to the subjects that interest me.